Jealousy

A slightly revised version of a paper presented at the Conference on Archetypal Psychology in Dallas, Texas, in 1977.     

An autobiographical segment from a cognitive‐developmental psychologist working on creativity

Gardner, Howard. To Open Minds: Chinese Clues to the Dilemma of Contemporary Education. New York: Basic Books, 1989, X + 326 pp., $21.95 hardcover, ISBN 0–465–08630–6     

Basic emotions: Theory and measurement

Abstract

There have been new conceptualisations and new evidence bearing on the question of whether or not some emotions are basic. There has been innovation in work on cognitive appraisals of emotions, in cross-cultural research, and in developmental psychology. We introduce some of these ideas, and in introducing the contributors to this volume, we lay out four considerations that affect understanding of whether or not some emotions are basic. These considerations are the separability of components of emotion, the differences of definitions, and indicators used by different theorists of basic emotions, questions about whether some emotions are derived from others, and mappings between elicitors, accompaniments, and consequences of emotions.     

Depression and heart rate variability in cardiac rehabilitation patients: exploring the roles of physical activity and fitness

Cardiac patients with depression have shown altered autonomic nervous system functioning, expressed as reduced heart rate variability. This may be associated with poorer physical fitness and less physical activity among depressed patients. These relationships were explored among patients enrolled in outpatient cardiac rehabilitation. 22 depressed and 22 nondepressed patients, matched for sex and age, were assessed at enrollment. The Beck Depression Inventory and structured interviews were used to measure depression. Patients completed ambulatory monitoring of ECG (i.e., Holter) and physical activity, as well as a treadmill stress test. Depression was associated with several measures of heart rate variability. Activity and fitness were lower among the depressed patients. Although exploratory, accounting for activity and fitness attenuated the relationship between depression and heart rate variability. This suggests that altered fitness and activity may help explain altered autonomic tone that characterizes patients with cardiovascular diseases who are psychologically depressed.     

Psychopharmacological enhancement: a conceptual framework

The availability of a range of new psychotropic agents raises the possibility that these will be used for enhancement purposes (smart pills, happy pills, and pep pills). The enhancement debate soon raises questions in philosophy of medicine and psychiatry (eg, what is a disorder?), and this debate in turn raises fundament questions in philosophy of language, science, and ethics. In this paper, a naturalistic conceptual framework is proposed for addressing these issues. This framework begins by contrasting classical and critical concepts of categories, and then puts forward an integrative position that is based on cognitive-affective research. This position can in turn be used to consider the debate between pharmacological Calvinism (which may adopt a moral metaphor of disorder) and psychotropic utopianism (which may emphasize a medical metaphor of disorder). I argue that psychiatric treatment of serious psychiatric disorders is justified, and that psychotropics are an acceptable kind of intervention. The use of psychotropics for sub-threshold phenomena requires a judicious weighing of the relevant facts (which are often sparse) and values.     

Review Essay: The Ethical and the Epistemological

In this review of Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, I suggest that Irwin Hoffman's claim that his proposed paradigm of constructivism is revolutionary becomes more comprehensible and substantial if we realize that constructivism not only is an epistemological stance but is a profoundly ethical and even theological position that sees construction as construction in the face of death. The pronounced dialectical approach Hoffman is espousing and developing enables us to see the underside of uncertainty not only as epistemological complexity but as the ever present potential for moral fallibility and guilt.     

The effect of fearful faces on the attentional blink is task dependent

In a set of three rapid serial visual presentation experiments, we investigated the effect of fearful and neutral face stimuli on the report of trailing scene targets. When the emotional expression of the face stimuli had to be indicated, fearful faces induced a stronger attentional blink (AB) than did neutral faces. However, with identical physical stimulation, the enhancement of the AB by fearful faces disappeared when participants had to judge the faces’ gender. If faces did not have to be reported, no AB was observed. Thus, fearful faces exhibited an effect on the AB that crucially depended on the observer’s attentional set. Hence, the AB can be influenced by an emotional T1 when T1 has to be reported, but this influence is modulated by task context. This result indicates a close connection between temporal attention and emotional processing that is modulated by task context.     

Impaired sensitivity to dynamic stimuli in poor readers of a regular orthography

The mappings from grapheme to phoneme are much less consistent in English than they are for most other languages. Therefore, the differences found between English-speaking dyslexics and controls on sensory measures of temporal processing might be related more to the irregularities of English orthography than to a general deficit affecting reading ability in all languages. However, here we show that poor readers of Norwegian, a language with a relatively regular orthography, are less sensitive than controls to dynamic visual and auditory stimuli. Consistent with results from previous studies of English-readers, detection thresholds for visual motion and auditory frequency modulation (FM) were significantly higher in 19 poor readers of Norwegian compared to 22 control readers of the same age. Over two-thirds (68.4%) of the children identified as poor readers were less sensitive than controls to either or both of the visual coherent motion or auditory 2Hz FM stimuli.